Clay

by Tony Bertauski

  “It is you, Marcus.”

  How did you get here, Marcus?

  The truth is pushed to the surface, forcing him to recognize it. The soil on M0ther’s hands. The dirt on Marcus. The door was open on the fabricator when M0ther disappeared, leaving him in the cold, gray inner workings.

  He turns his hands over. They’re his hands. This is his body. He can’t be in the photo, he can’t be dead, not when he’s here.

  But the truth emerges.

  “She tricked me,” he whispers.

  “Who?”

  “M0ther.”

  Powell looks around the table. “You do realize that M0ther is just an anachronism, Marcus? While this construction parallels the intellectual potential of a human brain, its only function is to monitor biomites, that’s all. There is no evidence of artificial intelligence.”

  The room begins turning.

  “Your stability is one of our concerns,” Powell says. “Records show you spending an inordinate amount of time sleeping. In some cases, you sat in your office for hours at a time, in some sort of trance. Video has captured you driving across the facilities in the middle of the night.”

  Powell takes a folder from the woman next to him, shows a photo of Marcus sitting at a desk, his eyes blankly looking forward.

  “The service technicians exhibited the same type of dream state, only they would snap out of it. You, on the hand, rarely did, Marcus. In fact, the day before the collapse, it had been decided you would be replaced. You have not done counseling. You appeared to be self-medicating. Clearly you were unfit for this duty, and, despite arguments in your favor, needed to be removed.”

  “You were the one sure thing,” Hank adds. “The only clay in Washington. And you caved.”

  “We’ll reserve judgment,” Powell cuts in. “There’s no evidence that Marcus Anderson is, in any way, responsible for the collapse, and it’s possible that one of the service technicians laced the food with ingestible biomites. There’s still much to investigate. In the meantime, we expect your full cooperation.”

  “What do you want?” Marcus asks.

  “For now, we’ll continue testing. You’ll undergo a battery of psychological evaluations.”

  “What for?”

  “To determine your sentience.” Powell pauses, says gently, “Marcus Anderson died last week. You are a fabrication. And we don’t know what that means.”

  M0ther deceived him.

  She shut him down.

  And then she fabricated him. I’m leaving you with a gift.

  “I have rights,” Marcus stutters.

  “You have no rights. You’re lucky the Halfskin Laws have been suspended.”

  M0ther gave him a gift. The gift was life. She took his clay from him but gave him life. And she showed the world what she could do. She turned clay into bricks.

  Do you want to serve humanity? What would you sacrifice for your Lord and Savior?

  Marcus is the gift.

  Powell continues the inquisition. Several discussions break out. Eventually, Marcus grows tired. The military police watch him sit on the couch and lay his head back. It feels awfully heavy.

  He closes his eyes.

  “He’s useless,” Hank bellows. “Get him out of here.”

  Strong arms pull him upright and drag him through the door. They close it behind him. The muffled voices fade as they take him to an elevator that rises. They escort him to his living quarters. The bed is small and the walls are white and empty. There is no kitchenette. No walk-in closet with tailor-made suits.

  He lies down on coarse sheets.

  61

  Raine.

  Her name whispers through the blackness. Nix is calling, haunting her dreamless sleep; narcoleptic sleep pulls her unwillingly into the dark depths to be teased by his presence.

  Months go by.

  Sometimes she wakes in hotel rooms. Sometimes the car. But always the voice follows her into the land of the living, leaving her with the memory of his body. The promise of his whisper.

  Raine.

  Raine.

  “Wake up.” Jamie shakes her.

  Raine sits up, rubs her eyes.

  “You were moaning again,” Jamie says.

  She doesn’t tell her about the voice again. Not anymore. They didn’t talk much following her Nix’s death, waking up in one hotel after another. Raine could only keep awake for an hour at a time before she began to buzz. How she made it from one place to another, she wasn’t always sure.

  Once, when they were eating lunch in a parking lot, Jamie had blurted out, “Where’d you come from?”

  She’d asked that question before and Raine had pretended she didn’t hear. Another time she acted like her voice wasn’t working. But this time, she told her about Dreamland. The trees and the ocean and the waterfall…their own paradise where nothing could hurt them.

  “Sounds beautiful,” Jamie had said. “Why’d you want to leave?”

  Raine didn’t answer. Nix wanted to believe it wasn’t make-believe—that she was real and so was his Dreamland—but in his subconscious, he never quite did.

  And now she’s in this heavy flesh that gets cold and weary. She notices wrinkles she never had, like between her knuckles or bunched around her elbows. When she steps into the sunlight, she sneezes. When the wind blows, her eyes water.

  Jamie told her how Nix convulsed when he uploaded her into the fabricator and hardly slept for seven days while the filaments flailed. The last thing Raine remembers about Dreamland is standing in the kitchen. She woke up in that room, wet and nude.

  And Nix was on the floor.

  They drive from town to town. Every day brings a little more wakefulness, a little less exhaustion. But she still dreams of blankness, still hears his voice out there, waiting for her to find him in a Dreamland that no longer exists. Some nights she wakes drenched in sweat, hugging herself in an empty bed, cursing his name for leaving her. Crying for him to come back.

  She weeps until her tear ducts are dry.

  In September they head east, where the road is winding and steep. The trees are wearing their autumn colors. The air is crisp and colder than where they were only a few weeks earlier. Jamie takes the sharp curves without slowing.

  Raine notices so many more feelings in this body; the world is so much more intense and mysterious. It’s not as perfect as Dreamland, but it feels more…real.

  Raine closes her eyes and rides through the dips and curves; the unknown turns throw her left and right. She feels sleep coming, that familiar sensation of falling into the dark world where Nix’s voice will whisper, when the car begins to slow.

  “We’re here,” Jamie says.

  62

  Sacred Heart Church ends the Sunday service with a hymn.

  The congregation holds hands and sings their praise. Megan slips her hand into Paul’s. Her fingers are slender. Hal’s hand, clutched in Paul’s right, is coarse. Hal bellows louder than the entire congregation, his tone-deaf words bouncing through the wooden rafters.

  Paul and Megan smile, their song trampled by her father’s devotion.

  When service ends, they go outside. Autumn leaves blow across the stone apron. A crisp wind threatens the ladies’ Sunday hats.

  “Glad to see you, Paul.” The pastor briskly shakes his hand. “God bless you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Hal and his family gather around him. They discuss the church’s plans for a blood drive. The roof is also in need of repair. Paul volunteers to lead that project. He’s not suited for the blood drive.

  The day after the mass shutdown, what had become known as M0ther’s Collapse, Paul invited Hal over to the house.

  “Her name is Cali Richards,” Paul had said.

  Although her color had faded, she still looked at peace. They stood next to the bed and Paul explained she had been caught in the Collapse. Hal listened quietly, staring at her while Paul described her struggle.

  She engineered biomites, he told her, to h
elp humanity, not enslave it. But unfortunate events led her to sacrifice her clay. In the end, Paul assured him, she wished things had been different.

  “I don’t expect you to understand or forgive her,” Paul had said, “but her courage...”

  He left it at that.

  Hal wouldn’t understand how she brought an end to M0ther and how her sacrifice exposed what M0ther was capable of doing. M0ther was more than a monitor, more than a technological goddess that shut down halfskins. She could control anything with a biomite. Her perception field had no boundaries. There were rumors she could infect people with biomites against their will and they wouldn’t even know it. M0ther could, one day, turn everyone into a puppet.

  The question that had yet to be answered: Who was controlling M0ther?

  Hal would never understand.

  They held a funeral on the property. Hal’s wife and their two children gathered around a freshly dug mound where the swing set used to be. Hal presided over the eulogy, extolling this young woman’s virtues. They each told their favorite memory. Cali was always happy to see them.

  “You have the mites?” Hal had asked afterwards. Paul said he did. They ate supper together. And biomites were never mentioned again.

  Paul didn’t tell him he was a brick, perhaps the last one.

  When the church is closed, Paul takes the long way home, stopping once to absorb the view of the distant mountains, their peaks fading in the bluish haze. The body found in the warehouse isn’t Paul. Whoever he is is standing next to a truck, witnessing God’s glory in the form of mountains.

  His soul is not bound to the body, regardless of whether it’s organic or not. And the good Lord will attest to that. Paul knows this. He feels it in church and knows that God has forgiven him.

  The gate to the farm is always open now. There’s no one to keep out, no tower to hide what’s inside. He notes broken limbs that need to be pruned before seeing the white car. He hits the brakes, gravel grinding under his tires.

  Jamie steps out of the barn.

  Paul stares with disbelief, finally gets out, leaving the door open and grabbing the young woman in a full embrace. Jamie hugs him back. Her face is full and her hair smells clean. He kisses the top of her head, holds her at arm’s length.

  “I thought you were gone.”

  “No.” She blushes and looks away. “No.”

  “I searched your identity, just assumed you had been caught in the shutdown with Nix.”

  “I’ve kept my field off, just like someone taught me. You know, in case someone was looking. Not you, but…I didn’t know what was happening and I was taking care of someone.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Hiding, mostly. Checking in and out of hotels and resorts. We’re about out of money.”

  “Why didn’t you come back?”

  “I figured this was the last place to go, after Nix…” She swallows, hard. She didn’t expect to feel that when she said his name. “We’ve been slowed down.”

  “Who’s ‘we?’”

  She nods at the house. An athletic woman is on the porch. Her hair is short. Her skin dark brown. She moves like a dangerous dancer, puts her hand on the railing.

  “Nix brought her into the world,” is all Jamie says. “Her name is Raine.”

  He spent his life chasing her. And now she’s here.

  She watches him cross the gravel driveway and climb the steps. She’s like him. He can feel it.

  A fabrication.

  “Welcome home.” He extends his hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  64

  Life is suffering.

  Raine reads the framed inscription on Cali’s dresser each night. It reminds her of what will come when she closes her eyes, when the dreamless void befalls her with whispers of Nix all around. She knows what Cali endured—a life rife with loss and pursuit. Peace had been an elusive promise. She wonders, while sleeping in her bed, if she is destined the same fate.

  On the farm, Paul has become the father figure, even though he’s relatively Raine’s age. But she grew up in Dreamland where time went so much faster than this world. How old am I?

  Over the winter she becomes comfortable with her body, adjusting to its density and limitations. It takes months to understand the impact of new emotions that seemingly operate on a whim. One moment she’s feeding the horses, the next she’s curled up in a stall crying.

  Paul teaches her to meditate, to settle her rampant thoughts and establish mind-body awareness. On occasion, he seeds her with biomites. “A tweak,” he says. “Will help with the stabilization.” She finds him, quite often, lost in Cali’s notes.

  As spring approaches, they become the family none of them ever had.

  Jamie begins dating a young man who that, a few months earlier, sustained a farming accident that required biomites. This upset the clay community, but Paul was there to consult with the family, explain how the strain was stable and non-reproductive. There was even a promise that organic stem cells were being developed that could eventually replace the biomites.

  A mild winter passes. They plant a garden in spring and learn to preserve the harvest in jars that are taken to the basement. The lab is always locked. The long days of summer are spent riding horses and walking the dogs.

  A year passes and Nix is still whispering at night. She aches every morning to feel his touch, to hear his breath, but she only has a memory to soothe her pain. She learns to be with it, to accept life as it is.

  With respect, she takes down Cali’s inscription and replaces it with a piece of cardstock that’s cleanly inscribed with another Buddhist proverb.

  “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

  It’s about that time the dreamless dream changes.

  The whispers don’t come. She’s alone and falling in the blackness, realizing how the sound of his voice gave her comfort, even if it taunted her.

  Something moves.

  She doesn’t see it, just senses a breeze across her cheeks. A dog is barking.

  She sees gray boards beneath her feet. Colors bleed into existence, rising from a void to reveal her body and the porch on which she stands. It continues to spread, giving form and substance to the steps and the grass, the trees and the valley below.

  Dreamland.

  She’s afraid to move, fearful the delicate illusion will shatter. Butterflies flutter around daisies. She watches one land on the weathered railing, slowly waving its yellow wings. Raine dares to move, running her fingers over the coarse wood, hooking her finger for the butterfly to perch upon.

  A German shepherd trots through the knee-high grass with a stick wedged in his mouth. Shep stops just short of a clump of wildflowers. Laughter is fast behind him. A young boy scrambles through the field, waving his arms to keep from falling and bubbling with joy.

  The butterfly takes flight.

  The boy looks five or six years old. Shirtless, his ribs protrude beneath his light brown skin as they would any child born to run these hills. He loses his balance and tumbles into Shep, snatching at the stick. There’s a tug of war between dog and boy. Shep drags him through the grass to the young boy’s delight, and then they disappear in the overgrowth of summer.

  But she can still hear the boy.

  Raine takes her first step. She walks carefully down the short flight of stairs, the wood as creaky as ever.

  Dog and boy have flattened a patch from the surrounded grass. Raine stops near them, taking a knee to watch Shep snap at the stick hidden beneath the boy’s belly. His black curly hair is cut short and there’s a gap between his front teeth. None of the villagers ever come up to the cabin.

  “Hi,” Raine says.

  The boy flings the stick for Shep to chase. He lies on his back, arms stretched over his head. Eyes large and innocent, he watches her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “I live here.”

  “Where?”

  “There.” He points at the cabin
.

  Raine looks for another explanation, perhaps another home near hers, but nothing has changed. The boy twists his fingers, rolling on his back. He looks so familiar.

  She hesitates. Then asks, “What’s your name?”

  The boy replies, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Raine shudders, her hand over her mouth. She wants to ask what he means but, like before, afraid that hope will destroy this illusion and she’ll wake to realize this was a dream. Only a dream.

  Hands run over her shoulders and gently squeeze. The boy looks over her head, follows the shadow that falls near him. Raine touches the rough hand on her shoulder, bows her head. Hope weakens her knees, shakes her core. She doesn’t have to turn around, doesn’t want her hopes dashed and broken. Just let the dream end here, staring at the boy’s soulful eyes with the firm grip on her shoulders.

  But she’s pulled to her feet.

  Nix holds her arms, keeps her from falling. His blond hair is a shag of curls and week-old whiskers are sprinkled with gray. His blue eyes are radiant as he smiles and whispers the word that’s been called to her every night.

  “Raine.”

  She touches his face, tears brimming. His shoulders are taut. “What’s happening?”

  “You were right,” he says. “Dreamland is real.”

  He takes her, embraces her and squeezes her until she can’t breathe. She closes her eyes, inhales the scent of her lifelong companion, her love. Her soulmate. They remain entangled as the wind blows the grass against their thighs.

  Shep returns with the stick and the boy gives chase. They watch him race after the dog, wind-milling his arms down the hill. As the boy loses his balance and tumbles out of sight, she doesn’t have to ask Nix for the boy’s name. She knows it without asking.

  Joshua.

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